After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Elspeth says, in that way that Alice always thinks is funny but serious at the same time, pushing them into his hand. ‘Are you running a business or what?’ Elspeth turns away, holding Alice by the shoulders and propelling her towards the door. All at once, they are out on the street again and Elspeth has handed her the string bag with the loaf of bread to hold, and soon they are going up the hill, hand in hand, towards home.

  Alice sits up and peers at the clock on the bedside table. She sighs shakily and rubs her face. It’s only ten minutes since she last looked. She flings herself back against the pillow, which is damp and clammy. Maybe she should get up, but what’s the point? She feels prickly-hot and kicks the duvet off her body impatiently. Car lights from the road criss-cross the dark ceiling.

  She’s been lying here in bed for four hours now and hasn’t slept yet. She’s so tired, so tired: she knows that if she could just sleep she’d feel better but her mind is whirring, whirring out of control like a bicycle freewheeling downhill. ‘Please, please, please let me sleep!’ she says, through gritted teeth to no one in particular.

  She turns over on to her side and tries to breathe deeply and concentrate on her favourite way of getting to sleep — a fantasy that involves John coming into the room, sitting on the edge of the bed and talking to her.

  She has just got to the part where she imagines the tug on the duvet from his weight as he sits down, when her eyes spring open. Her whole body tenses and she pushes her nails into her palms. Start again: she hears the door open, then his footsteps, she can hear him breathing softly, he comes round the side of the bed, she sees his sillhouette against the window . . .

  She sits bolt upright. Her jaw is clenched so hard that the sides of her head ache. ‘No, no, no.’ She grips handfuls of her hair as she starts sobbing uncontrollably — great wrenching gasps that make her cough and gulp for air.

  For a week or so now, she’s had this tiny, niggling suspicion that she’s been quelling, ignoring, pushing to the back of her mind, refusing to acknowledge it.

  She’s forgetting his face. She can no longer bring to mind an exact image of his features. His face, which she knew like her own, is fading from her memory.

  Alice blunders, panicked, from the bed and down the stairs. In the sitting room she tears open drawers and pulls out box after box of photographs. In her haste, she drops one and the pictures spill over the carpet in an arc of shiny rectangles. She falls upon them eagerly and snatches up pictures of John smiling in Spain, in Prague, decorating the house, at their wedding, by Camden canal. She lays them next to each other and kneels down to examine them.

  By the time she hears the electric rattle of the milk van coming down the street, she is sitting motionless in the middle of the floor, her knees drawn up to her chin, her hair hanging in tangled clumps over her face. All around her is a sliding sea of photographs.

  She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes and begins again at his hairline. She has his fringe, the creases on his brow, the curve of his temples, but after that, it’s no use. She can remember isolated features perfectly — the jut of his eyebrows, the way his hair grew in whorls on the top of his head, the black depths of his irises, the precise grain of his stubble, the swell of his Adam’s apple, the upward curve of his lips; but as soon as she tries to assemble them, the image blurs into a fuzzy mess.

  How can this have happened? How can she have forgotten his face so soon? Is this how it will be — that he will gradually fade from her memory?

  She feels cold. Her feet are chilly to the touch. She curls her hands around them, but doesn’t get up and starts to rock gently back and forth. The sun moves in longer and longer triangles around the floor. The postman drops some letters through the letterbox. Sometime during the day, the phone rings but she still doesn’t move when Susannah from work speaks to the answerphone: ‘We were just wondering if you were coming in today, Alice.’

  In late afternoon, she stops rocking, straightens up stiffly, slowly, walks through the photographs without looking at them and goes back to bed.

  I padded cautiously on bare feet over the runnelled, slippery tiles of the changing room of the Oasis sports centre. The air was humid and hot and smelt stiflingly of talcum powder and deodorant spray. Women in various stages of undress lined the walls. The noise was a mixture of chatter, the hiss of showers, a fair amount of giggling, distant echoey shouts from the swimming-pool and a faint pound of music from an aerobics class somewhere. It was after five and all the

  Covent Garden and Bloomsbury offices had emptied out their workers and it seemed that most of them were here, waiting for their step class, getting ready for the gym or struggling into swimming-costumes.

  At the pool edge, I wound my hair into a knot on top of my head and pulled my goggles down over my eyes. The scene was immediately cobalt blue: swimming-capped heads of indeterminate sex bobbed up and down the lanes as instructed by the poolside notices — in an orderly clockwise fashion — except for one man who was ploughing up and down the middle of the slow lane in a violent butterfly crawl. Sedate swimmers flinched as he sprayed them in a flurry of foam. I frowned. I hate people who do that.

  I lowered myself into the water, holding on to the aluminium ladder. The water was cold and my skin prickled with tiny goosebumps. When it reached my ribs, I released my hold and allowed myself to sink slowly, my palms lightly touching the smooth porcelain wall tiles, freefalling down into the turquoise water. My heart felt so weighted and heavy that 1 thought I might just sink to the bottom. All day at the office, I had been holding everything in while I spoke on the phone to the Arts Council, had a meeting with Anthony, showed a woman from a black literature project from Manchester round the library.

  The blue disks of my goggles filled with stinging tears. Without rising to the surface to draw in air, 1 turned over in the water and kicked off from the wall. After two long strokes, my head broke the surface and I gasped for breath, but I pushed my body on blindly.

  Five speedy lengths later, I crouched by the steps in the shallow end. My muscles ached and the blood was pounding around my body so fast that I felt dizzy. I had a sharp stitch under my ribs. Pulling off my goggles, I breathed deeply, drawing in large lungfuls of hot, chlorinated air, gripping the handrail.

  ‘Hi.’ A voice broke into my reverie and I turned to see a ginger-haired, tanned man with a goatee beard smiling at me with glittery white teeth. I recognised him as the man who was speeding up and down the middle of the slow lane. He had his hands on his knees, propping up his upper body.

  ‘Hello.’ I pretended to be adjusting my goggle straps.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, in the specially impassive, monotone voice I had perfected for times like this.

  ‘I’ve seen you here before. You come here a lot, don’t you?’

  I shrugged without looking at him. I could sense that his body was large with swelling, hard muscles on the upper arms; it gave off a heat that I could feel on my cooling skin. I stared down at my fractured reflection in the choppy water. My legs were marbled with fractured light, stippled with bubbles. I willed him to go away, feeling my earlier tears hovering somewhere just below the surface, ready to break out at any moment.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  I shook my head, unable to speak.

  ‘Hey, are you OK?’ He touched my arm. I flinched, covering the place he’d touched me with my hand. ‘What’s the matter? What did I say?’

  ‘Please leave me alone.’

  Without putting my goggles back on, I pushed myself away from the wall and swam with jerky, uneven strokes to the other end, where I pulled myself out of the water and reached for my towel, left folded up on a bench.

  Later, I sat at the kitchen table, my feet curled around the chair legs, my chin resting on my hands. My skin smelt of the tang of chlorine. My hair was still damp. I knew I should go and wash out all the chlorine and dry it properly, but I didn’t have the energy. I
also knew I should eat something, but what was the point, what was the fucking point.

  I sighed wearily and turned to look out of the back door into the garden. The sky was just beginning to deepen into a darker, indigo blue. Taking the key from a hook, I unlocked the door and walked out into the garden. It had rained sometime that afternoon, and the sodden trees were still dripping a steady, despondent rhythm. There was a fresh, green scent of damp soil, mingled with the sharp, sweet smell of rotting leaves.

  I sat on the bench under the tree for a long time, watching my neighbours’ lights come on in their back windows, the damp seeping slowly through the thin material of my skirt. At some point, the cat came to join me, the question mark of his tail appearing out of the gloom.

  Above me, the branches of the trees were tossed and bent in the gathering wind. The cat prowled around my ankles in a tight circle, his back arched. Dark, deep blue clouds raced over the sky. At a sound just behind me, I turned my neck, and as I did so, there seemed to be a kind of slippage in me, as if electrical contacts had been suddenly shifted and the crackle of a current was running through me on a different route. I realised something. I realised for the first time that all the unaccustomed disbelief and shock had, without me really noticing it, eroded into hard fact: he will never come again. He was dead. I had kept trying to make myself believe it and now I knew it. My heart knew it, my head knew it, my body knew it. He will never come again.

  I sat there for a long time, feeling so numb, as if all sound and sense had been switched off. What was left was a peculiar kind of peace: I felt hollow, as if my body was filled with nothing but smoke.

  I looked up into the sky. The violet had sunk into a pitchy dusk and birds sat higgled on the telephone wire that swept from the house opposite to the eaves of mine. ‘Life goes on’: so many people had said that to me. Yes, life fucking well goes on but what if you don’t want it to? What if you want to arrest it, stop it, or even battle against the current into a past you don’t want to be past? ‘You’ll get over it’ — that was another. But I didn’t want to get over it. I didn’t want to become used to the fact that he’d died. That was the last thing 1 wanted.

  I started up. It was darker. Lucifer followed me as far as the gate, which I slammed shut behind me. I bolted along the pavement, the echoes of my footfalls bouncing off the houses.

  I had no idea where I was going. All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant — the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away.

  Towards the tube station, the crowds of people thickened. I crossed the road, dodging the late-night traffic coming from the city centre and, to avoid a straggling group of people coming along the pavement towards me, I ducked into a side-street. I’ve no idea how long I walked for that night or where I went. I remember passing someone who called after me, ‘Are you all right, love, are you all right?’ and I must have passed by the fringes of Regent’s Park because I do recall the strange braying of the zoo animals carried towards me by the breeze.

  At one point I went into a twenty-four-hour supermarket. People were circling the shelves, filling wire baskets with ice-cream, wine and fruit, watched half-heartedly by a bored, underpaid teenager at the till. I wandered among them, mesmerised by brightly coloured packaging, notices of price cuts, lurid display stands. I trailed my hand over the shelves: hunks of yellow cheese, waxed fruit, cakes in shrink-wrapped plastic. When my hand encountered something soft, yet hard, I stopped. It was a ball of wool, bright red, its twisted skeins wound into a tightly packed cannon-ball. I weighed it in my hand. My hand was wet and slippery with wiped-away tears, but the wool sucked the moisture into itself, hoarding the salt water in its wound-up, labyrinthine strands.

  I felt tense with desire for it. I could not walk out of the shop without it, but I had no money with me — I’d left the house so abruptly. I cast a careful side glance at the teenager at the till: he was staring out of the window at the tube station over the road. I looked about me. To my left, a woman was intently absorbed in a choice of different flavours of tinned soup. So I just did it. I stuffed it quickly up under my jumper. Then I headed for the exit, and looking back over my shoulder only once, I let the door spring closed behind me.

  The thin wail of Jamie reached Kirsty through the leagues of her dreamless, zombiefied sleep. For a few moments, she could only open her eyes and stare at the darkened ceiling. Her limbs wouldn’t obey her brain. Beside her, Neil turned over in his sleep, oblivious. How did he do that? How come his brain wasn’t programmed into the children’s sleeping patterns, as hers was? When Jamie’s wail intensified to an outraged, hiccuping roar, she went into autopilot: sit up, swing legs off bed, stumble across debris of bunched-up socks, cardboard picture-books dissolving at the edges from too much toddler-sucking, discarded toys, a heap of maternity bras, feeding bottles and Neil’s shoes over to the cot.

  Tiny, reddened hands and feet were waving in the air. Jamie was lying on his back. When he saw her he filled his lungs for a mega-roar. Kirsty scooped up his stiffened frame on to her shoulder, muffling his cries, carried his warm, compact parcel of a body into the sitting room and sat down with him on the sofa. ‘Now then,’ she murmured, as she unbuttoned her nightdress, ‘what’s all this noise about?’

  As soon as her nipple was in his mouth he was silent. His fingers closed possessively around one of hers and the only sound was of his gentle, fast, shallow breathing and his hungry, wet sucking.

  It was a warm night. Kirsty curled and uncurled her bare toes to the rhythm of his feeding and leant back into the cushions. She began to feel the numbing, addictive opiate of sleep soak into her. Her hands slackened, her fingers curling away from her palms and the knots in her spine relaxed. She slid slowly towards unconsciousness.

  The next thing she remembered was the tingling feeling that there was someone else with her. Her head jerked upright, expecting to see a pyjama-clad Neil standing there in the dim light. The room was empty. Kirsty felt strange. Her heart was thudding. She had no idea how much time had passed. Jamie was asleep in her arms, the soft diamond of his fontanelle pulsing on the crown of his head.

  Alice. Alice was awake. Somewhere. She just knew it. Kirsty hadn’t managed to speak to her in weeks. Alice never seemed to be in or answering the phone when she called. Kirsty twisted her head around the room again, just to check her sister wasn’t there, by some surreal coincidence, then she got to her feet, hefting the weight of the sleeping Jamie up on to her shoulder.

  In the hallway, she crouched, Jamie on her lap, and dialled Alice’s number. It rang once, then she heard Alice’s voice, tight, strained: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi. It’s me.’

  She heard her sister take in breath and then break down in hysterical, gut-wrenching sobs. The tears trickled down Kirsty’s face and fell on to Jamie’s Babygro as she listened, the receiver clamped to her ear, to Alice’s grief, pouring down the phone line, and she said gently, ‘Alice, don’t. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Alice, don’t.’

  It went on for ten, fifteen minutes, maybe more. Round and round in Kirsty’s head, as if fixed on a loop-tape, was the thought: my sister is five hundred miles away, all alone in her house and she is crying to herself in the middle of the night.

  ‘Alice,’ Kirsty said at last, ‘why don’t you phone us when you’re feeling like this? I can’t bear to think of you crying like this on your own.’

  Alice began to speak in jolting, gasping snatches between sobs. ‘I just can’t do it . . . any more . . . Kirsty . . . It’s like something . . . my whole life . . . has come unstuck . . . used to be . . . always was so happy . . . enjoyed life . . . and now nothing is worthwhile . . . Can’t find anything ... to make me feel better . . . Everything is pointless without
him ... I feel dead . . . can’t feel anything any more . . . I’d rather be dead . . . Sometimes think I’m just going to lose it . . . just feel dead inside . . . can’t feel anything any more.’

  When Kirsty finally replaced the receiver, she went back into the bedroom and lowered Jamie into his cot. Then she slid into bed and, pressing her cheek to the dip of Neil’s spine, fell asleep with her arms around him.

  The shop has a narrow double door. Only one side opens. Alice has to slide in sideways, her bag catching on the door handle.

  ‘Hello again,’ the woman behind the counter says brightly. Alice parts her lips in a soundless greeting, heading straight for the wide, box-like shelves that are stuffed with balls of wool, one colour to each box. Behind her, the woman carries on her conversation down the telephone: ‘. . . and I said to her at the time, if you have another child, that’ll be you. 1 wouldn’t take any notice of what he wants. The best thing to do is be content with the one kid, get to a good surgeon, get it all whipped out and get yourself sewn up properly. But you know what she’s like . . .’

  Alice listens to her breathing to shut out the woman’s voice, reads the closely spaced words of a pattern, squeezes the balls of wool between her fingers, brushes their strands against her cheek to check their softness and selects pair after pair of long, lithe, silver needles of varying circumferences and lengths. Then she carries the lot to the till. The woman says into the phone: ‘Sorry, got to go. Yes . . . yes . . . I’ll call you later.’ She turns to face Alice and rings up her purchases on the till with pink-varnished fingernails like candied petals. ‘Your husband’s a lucky man, having someone who can knit all these nice clothes for him,’ she says, pushing the things into a plastic bag, making the needles clatter against each other.

  Alice twists the thin, platinum band that encompasses the fourth finger on her left hand. ‘Yes,’ Alice says, and has to clamp shut her mouth to make sure she doesn’t say anything else. It frightens her, how close she is to yelling something at this woman’s over-made-up, over-cheerful face.